Vol.LXVI No.17

This being a not very interesting number of the NYRB. But there was one item which caught my eye, a review of a book about Seleucid time by one Paul Kosmin. With the Seleucids being one of the dynasties that did well after the death of Alexander the Great, taking over, at peak, a large chunk of the near east. Knocked out of the game after about 250 years by Pompey, the one who was knocked out in turn by Caesar.

It seems that the Seleucids had the then novel idea of counting years from the start of the dynasty, rather than restarting the count at the beginning of each new reign. An arrangement which carried the implication that there was nothing before year zero: year zero was the beginning of time, the beginning of the world as we know it. So while individual kings were played down, the dynasty as a whole was played up.

States with annual magistracies, like Athens and Rome, had often named years by the name of the magistrate. So rather than lists of kings, favoured in Central America before the arrival of the Europeans, you had lists of years, each one named for one or more magistrates. This arrangement played up the magistrates, stroked their egos, but played down the sequence of the years, this not being immediately apparent from the names, and those with poor memories had to consult the list. I also recall that some of the Central Americans went in for something called the long count, a very large number of years, but I forget the details - and perhaps only the priests bothered with them at the time.

The review did not remind me when our present arrangement of counting years from the purported birth of Our Lord was instituted, or from which year - I think around 500 in our terms - the Muslims count theirs, or why. Although there is the clear implication that while kings and kingdoms might come and go, Our Lord came in year zero and that was that; a useful lesson in humility. But I do recall, that for some purposes, we still count by regnal years, with our Queen still using a formula amounting to 'given this day … in the 78th year of our reign' at the bottom of laws to which she is putting her name. I think the first Elizabeth did it too.

I don't think I will be buying the book, 379 pages of it from Belknap, despite the high standard of book design and production that I have come to expect from these last. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see a more complete catalogue of these year keeping arrangements: perhaps Wikipedia has one.

Reference 1: Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire - Paul J. Kosmin - 2019.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seleucid_Empire.